Quality of Care Assessment in Pediatrics: Are Parents the More Challenging Patients?

Tonio Schönfelder (), Peter Peschel () and Joachim Kugler ()
Additional contact information
Tonio Schönfelder: TU Dresden
Peter Peschel: TU Dresden
Joachim Kugler: TU Dresden

A chapter in Challenges and Opportunities in Health Care Management, 2015, pp 111-120 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The study aims to analyze the impact of proxy responses of parents of pediatric patients on quality of care assessments. Data used in this study were obtained from 5,551 randomly selected patients from three medical departments who responded to a mailed survey. The instrument consisted of 37 items and assessed medical and service aspects of the hospitalization, patient demographic data, as well as visit characteristics. Regarding pediatrics, parents acted as a proxy response for their children and filled in the survey. Potential differences in patient assessments were determined by comparing satisfaction ratings of parents and the remaining patients using non-parametric tests. The majority of patients were satisfied with the hospitalization; however, parents of pediatric patients were significantly less satisfied than patients of internal medicine and surgery and were also less likely to choose the same facility in case of another hospitalization. Most of the items measuring medical and service aspects of the hospital stay received significantly lower ratings by parents in comparison to participants of internal medicine and surgery. The perception of length of stay affects satisfaction ratings of patients of all medical departments. Patients who judged the hospital stay as appropriate were significantly more satisfied and more often willing to choose the same facility in case of another hospitalization than patients who perceived the hospital stay as too short or too long. In direct comparison to internal medicine and surgery, the parents of pediatric patients assessed the duration of the hospitalization three times more often as too long. Study findings show that parents acting as a proxy for their children report lower satisfaction ratings in comparison to self-reports of other patient cohorts, and also that the subjective perception of the length of stay influences satisfaction ratings.

Keywords: Patient Satisfaction; Satisfaction Rating; Medical Department; Subjective Perception; Statutory Health Insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-12178-9_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319121789

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-12178-9_9

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().